Rapise 5.4 - Rewriting its Support for Firefox 57

As we wrote back in August, Firefox has completely changed its plugin architecture in the soon to be released Firefox 57. One of the side effects is that many plugins including Selenium IDE and the plugin used by Rapise will not work. However one of the benefits of a commercial tool like Rapise is that we provide support, including updating our plugins when necessary.

So Why Did Firefox Break the Plugins?

As discussed on the Selenium IDE blog:

Browsers are complicated pieces of software that are constantly evolving. Mozilla has been working hard to make Firefox faster and more stable, while still retaining the flexibility and ease of extension that we’ve come to know and love. As part of that process, Firefox is switching extensions from the original “XPI” format, to a newer, more widely adopted “Web Extension” mechanism.

So the move by Firefox is in the long run good news. It means that plugins written for Firefox will be more easily ported to other "WebExtension" compatible browsers such as Chrome and Edge. In fact, the next version of Rapise (5.5) will include support for recording and playback on Microsoft Edge, which will leverage a lot of the new Firefox code :-)

What is the Impact

In the short term though it means that lots of existing plugins will be marked as legacy by Firefox - like this:

However the good news is that at Inflectra we've been ready for this transition, and with the release of Rapise v5.4 on Monday, we now have support for Firefox 57 and beyond, so our plugin looks like this:

However if you are running an older version of Rapise (5.3 or earlier) and Firefox suddenly stops working, this is the reason! You need to upgrade to v5.4.